~~~
“Woah,” I whispered, as we shifted back to human immediately upon hitting the cobbles of a very different alley in a very different city. La Paz’s 16th century colonial charm (if we want to call colonialism charming—which was not at all high on my list of things to call colonialism; I had some other choice words for colonialism that were far less complimentary—but if we’re just talking architecture, sure, the buildings were cute) had been left behind and replaced with a sort of melted glass meets Sagrada Familia look that was so impressive it left me with the vocabulary of Keanu Reeves learning Kung-fu.
The last time I’d been in this city we’d been instantly set upon by MOME agents and then apprehended by the Unterberg security golems (who had promptly put bags over our heads), so I hadn’t had much time to look around, even though I’d been just as entranced with the view then as now.
Instead of the scent of alley sewage (thankfully shed along with our clothes, which had been replaced due to our brief stint in feline form), the air here was filled with something warm and slightly floral, as though fruit-bearing trees were in bloom nearby—albeit no tree I was familiar with. Indeed, peeking above a high wall nearby, visible even in the moonlight, their blossoms were a riot of colors rarely seen in my world, striped and polka dotted as though they were more fashion show that flower. The buildings looked almost organic, aside from the fact that they followed patterns that looked so intricate and symmetrical it was difficult to imagine that they weren’t created by sentient beings. The color selections also seemed too vibrant and contrasting to be naturally occurring. While most of the architecture seemed to be made of stone or clay, every building was adorned with giant sections of glass—windows and sometimes entire walls—forming a vibrant display that reflected even the moonlight with enthusiasm.
As we walked from the cobbled alley where we’d arrived into the larger, cobbled street beyond, it was difficult for me not to stare. The streets, which had been packed with people headed to market the last time we had been here, seemed no less crowded now that the sun was down. The people were almost impossible to describe, and en-compassed beings whose skin colors ranged from lime to aubergine, jet black to glittering silver, and who sported a startling array of hair, fins, wings, and horns, not to mention a variety of limb numbers that often exceeded four. I couldn’t help but smile, as I turned to Sol and reached for her hand.
“Unterberg may not be safe, but at least the sightseeing is good when you aren’t instantly forced to run for your life,” I said.
Which was, of course, when a large, black ball of fur launched itself at me, tackling me against the nearest decorative window before I could even make out where it had come from.
“WHAT THE FUCK? Seamus?” I said, as the black ball of fur disengaged from my chest to shift back to his human form, complete with a jeans and T-shirt combo appropriate for Unterberg’s warm summer nights. Unfortunately, I was too flustered from having my back abruptly slammed into an ornate stained-glass window to appreciate the way the aforementioned T-shirt clung to his swimmer’s body, the way he smelled slightly of fur and cinnamon, or the way the moonlight glinted off his amber eyes.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“It’s uh… a long story,” Seamus said, looking somewhat abashedly from Sol to me. “I was worried about you two.”
I took a deep breath and tried not to let out an exasperated sigh. We’d all been worried about each other lately, but Seamus had been safely tucked away with his Moms for once, and I had been mildly relieved to think he wouldn’t be risking his ass with us today.
“Seamus, I thought we talked about the over-protective male thing,” I began, but Seamus cut me off.
“It’s not that, Vic. Fuck’s sake, you’re here with Sol. I know you two can take care of yourselves better than I can.”
Seamus’ eyes darkened and I wondered if he was angry or jealous about that fact.
“So, what’s going on? Is everyone ok?”
Seamus took a deep breath.
“My Moms are fine, if that’s what you’re asking, but…”
To my surprise it was Sol who took Seamus’ arm and turned him so that she could look in his eyes and speak to him with a level of concern I hadn’t heard from her before.
“Did you see something?” she asked.
Seamus looked like he might cry with relief as he nodded, and I kicked myself for jumping to the assumption that he was here to play the overbear-ing male in a story that had far too many alphas in it already. I should have known better. Seamus might have a protective streak from being a wolf raised by wolves, but he had little interest in dominance. He must have had a vision.
“Do you want to tell us about it?” I asked, belatedly trying to match Sol’s level of concern.
Seamus shook his head and took a deep breath.
“I don’t think I should. Not all of it, at least. First, because we don’t really have time, and second…” Seamus looked between both of us, as though he was searching for an answer to a question he hadn’t asked aloud. I didn’t know what answer he was looking for, so I just smiled as reassuringly as I could while Sol squeezed his arm a bit. “Don’t freak out, but Rhelia needs our help. Which I suppose you guys know if you’re here already, but… I need to be there too, and… this is gonna sound weird, but… we can’t trust the green lady.”
He flinched after he said all of that, as if expecting us to say or do something that would hurt him, now that he’d said it. I just looked between Sol and Seamus and wondered what my life had become that vague prophecies not only didn’t surprise me anymore, but kinda made sense. I mean, I didn’t know who the green lady was, but whatever, we were in Unterberg, where every color in the Crayola box was a perfectly normal skin tone. Still, I was guessing she’d be pretty obvious when we ran into her. Meanwhile, I was adding to the mental list of questions I needed to ask Seamus when we finally had time to talk like normal humans. Like why he looked like he expected to be punished for telling us about a vision.
“Alright, noted. We won’t trust the green lady. Anything else?” I asked.
Seamus shook his head, but there was still a haunted look in his eyes.
“Seamus, are you… are you sure you need to come with us? We have no idea what we’re up against here and…”
I trailed off as I realized I was being a colossal hypocrite, after I’d just accused Seamus of being an overprotective git, but… he already looked scared enough to crap his pants, and we all knew that he wasn’t a very effective fighter. Maybe I was just trigger shy after almost losing everyone I loved three days ago, but it seemed irresponsible to let him join us on this particular mission if he didn’t absolutely have to be there.
Seamus rolled his eyes, and I cringed, expecting him to tell me off for being an ass. Instead he said something completely reasonable.
“Vic, I know I’m not the best fighter. This isn’t about that. I just… I have more information than you do, and I can’t convey it all in a reasonable amount of time. There are too many variables, and... look, let’s just say that when I tried to run alternate scenarios for the future, all the ones without me in them ended… unacceptably.”
The amount of times Seamus hesitated in that little speech had me incredibly wary of what he’d seen, but I barely got a chance to pick one of the thousand questions it raised (to start with: Seamus’ Moms’ new place was on the other side of the city from where we were, and Seamus shouldn’t have known where to find us—because we hadn’t told anyone how we were getting to Unterberg or where we’d come out; then there was the fact that he could apparently sift through possible futures to see which ones worked best, and the implications of that were off the hook) let alone voice one.
“Seamus, how did you even get—”
I was cut off by a large, heavy hand falling onto my shoulder while a voice said, “You should not be here, Ms. Marmot.”
UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE body attached to that hand, I don’t take ki
ndly to being touched without permission and, unlike a minute ago when I’d been bowled into by a close friend at high velocity, whoever had their hand on my arm was not someone I recognized immediately. Nor did they move fast enough to prevent years of training from kicking in.
Which was how I wound up looking down at the profile of a very large, fur-covered, irate person with a bull’s head pressed sideways into the cobblestone street. I was still holding his wrist and twisting it in a way that was designed to be in-credibly painful, which, combined with the impact from rolling over my shoulder and hitting the ground from a few feet up, probably explained the “irate” part of that description.
“Sorry, umm…. Torrence, was it?”
Don’t ask me how my brain supplied the name of a minotaur I’d met once in a room full of other fantastic creatures during our first visit here, but… well, to be honest, Torrence is a pretty memorable name. Especially for someone with a bull’s head.
Since I remembered him now, and he didn’t appear to be trying to kill me at the moment, I released my hold on his arm and helped him to his feet. It took almost a minute before he was able to speak again, though. I guess I’d knocked the wind out of him.
While we waited, I looked to Seamus and Sol, and found that Seamus looked weirdly calm, as though large bull-people regularly put their hands on his friends and wound up lying on the pavement for it. Sol, meanwhile, looked rather like she’d have preferred it if I’d pulled a knife on the guy instead of helping him to his feet.
I shrugged and took a second to look around the crowded street, worried we might have drawn someone’s attention and would shortly wind up with a bunch of the council’s golems chasing us down again, but it looked like the nighttime hustle of Unterberg remained content to ignore our existence.
“I am sorry if I startled you,” Torrence said, when he had finally caught his breath.
I blinked a few times as my brain caught up with what I was hearing. Judging by how pissed Tor-rence had looked when I’d flipped him, I really hadn’t expected an apology.
“Apology accepted. For the record, I do not appreciate being touched without warning or my consent.”
Torrence tipped his large bull’s head, and the red-brown fur coating his highly sculpted, shirtless upper body glistened a bit in the moonlight.
“Duly noted, Ms. Marmot. I regret the breach of personal space. I was… upset, and not thinking clearly.”
I nodded, totally at a loss for words as this mysterious semi-bovine person replied to me with the kind of respect I would hope to get from a 21st century modern human who had overstepped their bounds. Of course, he was a 21st century modern bovine-person. After a moment’s consideration, I decided I probably shouldn’t let the elements of this place, which reminded me of so many fantasy novels, movies, and MMORPGs, lead me to unfair assumptions about its residents’ standards for decency.
As part of my brain reassessed where Torrence (and perhaps all of Unterberg) stood in terms of modern ethics, some other part of my higher functioning raised a more pertinent issue.
“As dragon kin I have the freedom to wander Unterberg in safety,” I said, eyeing the minotaur (or tauren, or whatever he was) with a bit more suspicion. “You and the rest of your council left us free to go. Why shouldn’t I be here?”
“It isn’t safe to discuss out in the open,” Torrence whispered. “Would you and your partners be willing to accompany me to a safe location?”
I looked at Sol and Seamus. Sol shrugged, still looking suspicious but not quite as stabby as she had a minute ago. Seamus gave me the kind of nod that told me he had expected this turn of events. I swallowed the questions that sprang to my lips. Now wasn’t the time to grill Seamus on how his visions worked, or how much of the future he actually saw, especially considering the fact that Torrence was here, but I made a mental note to ask Seamus all about it the next time we had five minutes to ourselves.
“Fine, Torrence. After you.”
“It would be easiest if you would allow me to transport you there.”
Honestly, if Rhelia hadn’t mentioned Torrence as a contact in her missive to Trevor I never would have agreed, but Seamus had the composed face of someone who wasn’t the least bit surprised, and outside of hoping we’d find Rhelia in her apartment, we didn’t really have much of a plan now that we’d made it to Unterberg. Whatever info Torrence had would probably be useful, and either way, we certainly didn’t want to discuss our mission out in the street.
The bull-man (minotaur? Tauren? I seriously needed a couple minutes with no one trying to kill me so that I could figure what all the major species in Unterberg were called) nodded, straightened himself out while wincing a bit, threaded one of his arms through mine, and then grabbed onto both Sol and Seamus by the forearms, all while saying something guttural that sounded suspiciously like an expletive.
Then the world disappeared.
“UGH… SHIFTING HAS never made me want to throw up before,” I muttered, even as my stomach came entirely too close to re-leasing itself on the highly polished marble floor in front of my face.
The floor was in front of my face because I was bent over at the waist trying to hold my dinner in place. I barely registered that it didn’t match the cobbled streets we’d been standing on moments ago, because the sounds of Sol failing to keep her own meals in place threatened to overwhelm me. Seamus was also making retching sounds, but as far as I could tell he wasn’t actually evacuating his stomach yet. I was doing my best not to breathe through my nose, but a hint of vomit and floor polish trickled in regardless, making the retention of my most recent meals seem less and less likely.
“Strange,” said the deep voice that I now associated with the bull’s head and heavily furred and muscled torso known as Torrence.
I supposed there were probably some legs in-volved in the equation, but I really couldn’t call them to mind in that moment, as I stared at a particularly shiny vein of marble and tried to think about anything but vomit. That might’ve been because Torrence was shirtless, or… yeah, ok, maybe because of the bull’s head. I mean, the overall effect was pretty distracting. Half because he was surprisingly attractive, bull’s head and all, and half because he was a bit disturbing. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can turn into a snow leopard and a dragon, so who the fuck am I to judge someone for having a bull’s head, but… it was the transition from what was essentially a very furry human to a full-on bovine head with horns that threw me off, ok? I was trying not to be judgy about it, but it was something I’d only ever seen in video games and movies up to now and… well, seeing it in real life took some getting used to. For me anyway, but hey, add it to the pile, right? What wasn’t new to me these days? And Gwendamnit, I must’ve been desperate to think about anything other than being sick all over this fancy marble if I was this obsessed with Torrence’s appearance.
Torrence was mid-way through a sentence my brain hadn’t processed at all when he danced out of the range of Sol’s latest splatter and straight into my line of sight, drawing my vision from the sparkly, gold-veined marble tiles to some very shapely furred calves and…
“Hooves,” I muttered, even as Torrence continued speaking. I had to drag my eyes away from the badass leather kilt that stopped just above Torrence’s knee and circled his waist, which was muscular enough that I could make out his six pack even through all the fur. I shook my head and made a stronger effort to tune into what Torrence was saying.
“Most magic users find shifting planes to be both exhausting and nauseating in the early days, and shifters spend their entire lives feeling adverse effects from it. And yet you claim you do not feel it?”
“Nope. I do not claim that at all. I’m just barely not covering your pretty little hooves in the last 24 hours’ worth of meals I’ve eaten. But whenever I shift us, I don’t feel this way.” Torrence’s hooves weren’t little, actually, but they were well-kempt and even a bit shiny, so I felt like pretty covered those bases nicely.
Sol
kicked me, belatedly, from where she lay crumpled on the floor, and almost toppled into her own vomit. Consequently, I straightened up and went to grab her, hoping to prevent the whole scene from devolving into one of my worst nightmares. No way was I going to keep any food down if she tumbled into a pool of vomit. Just the smell of what was already there was pushing my limits.
Ugh.… Time for a subject change.
“So, what exactly did you just do to us?” I asked, deciding that if Sol wanted me to stop talking about my shifting power, asking my own questions was as good a distraction as any. Not that I thought Torrence would fall for it, but I was genuinely curious anyway.
“He cast a spell, Vic,” Sol muttered, her voice still ragged from her recent escapades in food relocation.
“I used my own access to dark matter to pull us through a pocket dimension that paralleled both the location we were in and this location.”
“Like lining up stitches in a crochet pattern and then pulling through all three at once?” I asked.
Torrence hesitated before saying.
“I do not crochet as much as I once did, but that is an apt comparison, yes.”
Sol’s mouth dropped open a bit, and Seamus snickered.
“You used to crochet?” she asked.
Torrence only smiled. I think. I mean, on a bull’s face that could easily have been gas.
“I’m liking you more and more, Torrence,” I added, before Torrence could take offense at Sol’s question, or Seamus’ laughter. I doubt either Sol or Seamus meant to offend—Sol hadn’t sounded condescending at all, just surprised, and I think Seamus was more amused at Sol’s surprise than the fact that Torrence crocheted. Seamus’ Moms had shown me a quilt he’d made last summer, and he basically never stopped drawing, so I didn’t think he found arts and crafts to be degrading activities.
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 40
